By Ken Macon
Apple calls it memory assistance; everyone else might call it a new kind of social privacy problem.
There’s no end to the tech industry’s desire to make everyday conversations something that are processed, analyzed, and stored by machines, and made available to, not the person these conversations are with, but the device owner.
Apple’s new features announced on September 9 for the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 are opt-in, but this means the person who owns the device has the option to allow their Apple Watch to store conversation summaries, while the person they’re speaking to has no say in the matter.
The features, Live Rewind and Siri Recap, will be arriving in beta later this year. Live Rewind is more of a “do-over,” allowing the wearer to see the last 15 seconds of conversation as text on the watch face, after they double-press the Digital Crown.
Siri Recap, on the other hand, makes brief summaries of conversations, that can be referenced later. Siri Recap “can be set to be on all the time,” alternatively, the wearer can schedule it or turn it off. Apple says the idea is to help people remember what was said in a conversation without taking notes.
Apple’s support page does its best to allay any privacy and security fears regarding the way the two features work. The company says that with Live Rewind, audio is processed locally on the watch, in the S11 chip’s hardware-isolated Secure Exclave, and deleted immediately after processing. The wearer’s paired iPhone is used for Siri Recap to transcribe and condense the conversation, before the encrypted, condensed text is sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute to be summarized, and then sent back to the watch.